Life-Affirming Productivity with Paloma Medina
What if spending a few minutes each day touching a plant or staring into space could change your life? Paloma Medina has seen it happen—and tells us why it’s the first step toward radical, equitable change.
Paloma Medina is a management trainer, public speaker, coach, and entrepreneur who uses neuropsychology to help leaders develop more inclusive and equitable practices. She joins us to talk about trading cortisol addiction for life-affirming productivity, the power of tracking equity metrics on your team, and why she recommends everyone spend 5 minutes a day doing nothing.
Inclusion is a sense of belonging. It is how we pick up signals from others that we are valued, liked, that we belong. That we have friends, that we've got people on our side. A ton of the work that I did in the beginning in researching equity and inclusion and how it intersected with the kind of manager trainer I could be was realizing there is all this neuropsychological research that shows that belonging is this absolute core need. Humans are wired to scan for it, protect it, and freak out fully if there's any threat to their inclusion.
—Paloma Medina, management trainer
We talk about:
- How the neuropsychology of productivity relates to equity and inclusion
- How to transition away from hustle culture and into life-affirming productivity
- The difference between equity and inclusion
- How leadership can use the three E’s of professional development to combat bias in the workplace: education, exposure, and experience
- How closing down Paloma's retail store, 11:11 Supply, helped her find a renewed sense of self-worth in the midst of uncertainty
- The power and protest of doing nothing
- The BICEPS model of core needs
Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara shares a post from Desiree Adaway on the connection between overwork and white supremacy: “White supremacy knows that when we're exhausted, we remain obedient. And when we're overworked, we tend to stay quiet.” For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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